Travels in juvenile literature

In October 2018, to celebrate the 220 year anniversary of the founding of the Tottenham Female Benefit Club, a new plaque will be unveiled and a talk given by Associate Professor Susan Johnson, University of Bath titled Reflections on Feminism and Microfinance. Information on the celebrations can be found on the Priscilla Wakefield website here

Read more about Priscilla’s pioneering work to establish an early form of savings bank.

Further research has led me to agree with Janine McVeagh that the date of the picture (below) is earlier than 1774, more likely to be 1771, the year Edward and Priscilla married. It was customary to give gloves as tokens at weddings to the bride, groom and guests. The portrayal of fine clothes and gloves are described in the book Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540-1640 by Robert Tittler (DOI: 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199585601.001.0001). Although the date coverage of this text is earlier than the marriage his comments are relevant. When discussing gloves in portraits he says:

“We find gloves in all sorts of portraits: of men and women, of the courtly and the non-courtly, the landed gentry and urban tradesmen. We find them in various states: worn, lying on a table, and, most often, as a pair held together in one hand. We also see them in various states of finery and embellishment, from the relatively mundane to the extraordinarily ordinate.” (p.130)

Focusing on the gloves in the portrait Edward is wearing a right-hand glove and holding the left. The unpaired gloves have been described as “aristocratic iconography” by Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones in their article ‘Fetisizing the glove in renaissance Europe’ Catherine wears the long gloves that became popular in the 1700s, according to this website http://www.fashionintime.org/history-gloves-significance/ and looking closely at the seated Priscilla she appears to be wearing fine pale or flesh coloured gloves befitting a bride.

In 2009 I did post about this picture and received some comments. It was painted around 1774 and depicts Edward Wakefield, his wife Priscilla (on the right) and Priscilla’s sister Catherine Bell in the centre. Read about Catherine here

It is such an intriguing composition that seems full of hidden meaning. I welcome any further comment on the background, the position of the subjects, the hands, the objects they are holding and the clothing.

A recent Internet search has revealed a source related to Priscilla’s publications. It is the Darton & Harvey archive held at the University of Reading. The link to information about this archive is here http://www.reading.ac.uk/adlib/Details/archiveSpecial/110014355 and Priscilla is noted at the bottom of the entry.

The inclusion of folded maps was a feature of Priscilla’s travel books. The above image provides a sense of the scale of these maps in comparison to the text. It must have been a source of delight to children to carefully unfold them and follow the adventures of Arthur, Henry Franklin and Sancho in North America.

This image is on the website of an online auction for Excursions in North America with the following description.

There has been interest from later descendants and academics in researching Priscilla Wakefield. One of the descendants was Mrs Mary Priscilla Mitchell who accumulated a lot of Wakefield material. Following is a link to the transcript of a recording that was made in 1986 and held in the Borrow Collection at Flinders University http://hdl.handle.net/2328/23546 Click on the ‘view/open’ link to read the transcript.

Of particular interest is the confirmation that Priscilla’s Journals could not be located at that time and appear to be lost.